My father founded his company, ASG, 15 Years Ago to provide retail real estate services: helping retailers to audit landlords, manage leases, build stores, negotiate deals and develop strategy. Personally, I started working with my dad 8 years ago, and built up a cloud platform called ASGedge for managing retail real estate.

There are so many glamorous stories of aspiring entrepreneur’s from Shark Tank or venture capital funded companies — it’s refreshing to hear how a company was built without outside capital by building relationships and providing good service.

It is a bit different from what I’ve written about, but I was very excited to interview my dad because it’s a story of how a successful company got off the ground: how they found their first contracts, hired their first employee, faced growing pains and built a solid business in the wild ever-changing world of retail.